Today at THT

Deep thought: come July, Jim Rice won’t even be the best guy to ever have played left field for the Red Sox to be inducted that day.

Though I appreciate and respect the work of hardcore analysts, I’m not an analysis guy and often don’t understand how a given analyst has gotten from A to B. This dynamic often results in me parroting things that a given analyst says because it seems so damn persuasive, even if I can’t say why. Other times, however, I am skeptical — again for no concrete reason — and I quickly assume a contrary note. The common denominator here is that I rarely know what the hell I’m talking about, and like 95% of the population, I’m just trying to seem smart.

Example: several years ago I was introduced to the concept of the compensatory pick and how that all plays into free agency and arbitration offers. Soon after, I would find myself in random conversations talking about the manifest value of the draft picks. Which is fine, except for the fact that I am certain that at some point over the years I began to drastically overstate this value, and believe that others have too. Really, when you’re advocating that a given team let its entire starting nine, its manager, its broadcasters, and 2/3 of its fan base walk, the response of “hey, they’re getting picks” just doesn’t seem all that satisfactory. If I knew a single thing about how to value these picks, I wouldn’t have been flopping around in this land of dogma, hunches, and ultimately uncertainty for long, but I didn’t, so here I am.

Treder continues his BL, TR series, this time focusing on catchers. Warning: this entry requires that nice things be said about Tim McCarver, and Steve says them, so if you’re the type that gets upset when you have trouble sustaining rage over a given subject, you may want to move along to the next thing.